Chrome OS is extremely purpose built and it is something that should bring about great concern to those at Microsoft. I personally don't have a problem with Windows 8, but purpose built is hardly a phrase that applies to the OS - at least if you're talking about it on a more traditional PC. I suspect by the time we get to Windows 9, Microsoft will have a better answer to the critics of 8/8.1, but that gives Google and its Chrome OS partners at least another year of marketshare erosion. At the beginning of this mobile journey I remember x86 being an advantage for Intel, and we all know what happened to that. Similarly, I remember Windows/Office being advantages for Microsoft. If Microsoft doesn't find a quick solution for making low cost Windows PCs just as well executed as Chrome OS devices, it'll find itself in a world where Windows no longer matters to entry-level/mainstream users.

Apple's taken over the high-end, Google is taking over the low-end, and in mobile, the company barely registers.

If you're doing it right you'd be running the web dev environment as a VM anyway.

Why is that so?

I have a VM for checking if I have introduced any environment problems that is close enough to production. In any case it gets tested and QA'd on a two servers that are clones of live environment, any configuration/environmental issues are going to be caught there.

Most of the time I want to work in my OS of choice, not dick about remoting into a VM.